underground — creatures that apparently had the power to kidnap surface people and subject them to unthinkable tortures in their secret underground caverns. ‘The voices came from beings I came to realize were not human; not normal modern men at all. They lived in great caves far beneath the surface. These alien minds I listened to seemed to know that they had great power, seemed conscious of the fact they were evil.’ (52) This realisation proved too much for Shaver: he quit his job and embarked on the aimless wanderings through North America mentioned earlier. During this time he was tormented by invisible, deleterious rays projected at him by the evil subterraneans. Eventually, however, he was contacted by a beautiful young woman named Nydia who was a member of another subterranean group opposed to the evil ones. Needless to say, they became lovers and with her help Shaver was able to gain entry into the underworld and access the ‘thought records’ that contained the fantastic history of the Earth.
According to the thought records, the Sun was originally a huge planet whose coal beds were ignited by a meteor strike, transforming it into a star. Since this star burned coal(!), it radiated clean, positive energy. The Earth was then colonised by two spacefaring civilisations, the Titans and the Atlans, who possessed marvellous technological devices ‘such as the ben-ray, which broadcast healing energies; the stim-ray, which prolonged and heightened sexual pleasure; the telesolidograph, which could broadcast three-dimensional images; the penetray, used to observe events from vast distances; and the telepathic augmenter or telaug, which transmitted thought.’ (53)
The Atlans and Titans called the Earth Lemuria, and lived in Utopian bliss until 20,000 years ago, when the Sun’s outer shell was destroyed and it entered its current phase, producing harmful radiation, called d, de or dis. This disintegrant energy is the opposite of t or te, the integrative, formative energy in Shaver’s dualistic world view. Their immortality under threat, the Atlans and Titans excavated gargantuan caverns and tunnels far below Lemuria/Earth’s surface, in which they built fantastically huge cities, the largest of which would dwarf New York or London. These subterranean realms shielded the entire Titan and Atlan population, some 50 billion individuals. However, the underground cities did not prove a permanent solution and 12,000 years ago Lemuria/Earth was abandoned in favour of younger star systems. (54)
Many Lemurians had already fallen victim to the debilitating effects of the Sun’s harmful radiation and were forced to remain on Earth. Some of them moved to the surface (the reader will not be surprised to learn that these were the ancestors of Homo sapiens), while the ones who remained in the subterranean realms degenerated into a race of disfigured, idiotic and very malicious beings known as the ‘dero’. This word is a contraction of ‘abandondero’, and is based on the Mantong words ‘de’ (meaning negative or destructive) and ‘ro’ (meaning subservient). Hence the deros were, literally, controlled by negative forces. The group to which Shaver’s exotic girlfriend belonged are known as the ‘tero’, or integrative ro, ‘te’ denoting positive or constructive energy. The tero, who somehow managed to avoid contamination by the Sun’s radiation, are locked in a constant struggle with their unpleasant cousins.
According to Shaver, the fiendish, sadistic and perverted dero kidnap thousands of hapless surface-dwellers every year, and take them into their cavern cities where they are tortured, sexually abused, used as slave labour or eaten. Although fundamentally stupid and brutal, the dero nevertheless know how to use the fabulous machinery left behind by the Lemurians and are able to spread evil and destruction throughout the world by means of dis rays. As Bruce Lanier Wright wryly notes: ‘If you doubt this, you may be suffering from brain damage. Vast numbers of surface worlders — you, me, and most certainly Richard Shaver — have been slyly lobotomised by rays projected from the caverns.’ (55)
The response to ‘I Remember Lemuria!’ was astonishing. Not only did the March 1945 issue of Amazing sell out but Palmer received a torrent of mail, numbering thousands of letters, many of which were from people claiming to have had bizarre experiences with the denizens of the fabulous subterranean world. One letter, from an ex-Air Force captain, read in part:
For heaven’s sake drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9-inch scars on my left arm … [M]y friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right biceps. It was scarred inside. How we don’t know. But we both believe we know more about The Shaver Mystery than any other pair … [D]on’t print our names. We are not cowards, but we are not crazy. (56)
While the above may or may not be true (Childress suggests that Palmer himself may have fabricated it), there is no doubt that many thousands of people were deeply affected by ‘the Shaver Mystery’, and wrote to Palmer to tell him so. Many had tales of encounters with strange people who may have been deros, while others complained that they, too, were hearing bizarre voices in their heads. Some even claimed to have visited the cavern-world itself.
By now, the phrase ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ will surely have suggested itself to the reader. To be sure, Shaver’s claims sound very much like he was suffering from this condition: the voices in the head experienced in connection with a mechanical device (the welding gun) are classic symptoms, as is the belief that unpleasant influences are being projected at the victim through air ducts, pipes and so on. As Peebles notes, paranoid schizophrenics ‘commonly believe a death ray is causing health problems, destroying their brain, or causing them to hear voices’. (57) This sounds remarkably like what the hapless Shaver was apparently going through, and yet it falls far short of explaining why the number of letters to Amazing Stories jumped from 50 per month before the Shaver Mystery to 2,500 per month during and after, virtually all of which maintained that something sinister and terrifying really was going on beneath the Earth’s surface.
Palmer himself was reluctant to commit himself on the veracity of Shaver’s claims. While he invariably supported Shaver, he also suggested that the dero caverns might not exist as physical locations in this dimension, but rather on the astral plane. However, Palmer did make the perhaps inevitable claim that he himself had heard the voices of the cavern dwellers while visiting Shaver and his last wife, Dorothy, at their Pennsylvania home. Palmer claimed that he heard five disembodied voices discussing the dismemberment of a human being in a cavern four miles below. For his part, Shaver maintained that the deros and teros did not live on some astral plane but were solid, flesh-and-blood beings, and that the cavern world was a real place.
Despite its huge popularity with the readers of Amazing Stones, the Shaver Mystery prompted a powerful backlash among diverse groups, including hard science fiction fans who objected to a pornographic fantasy being marketed as truth (and who organised a campaign to boycott the magazine) and various occult groups who criticised Palmer for releasing information that would surely prove lethal to anyone inexperienced or foolish enough to attempt an exploration of the caverns. At the end of 1948, the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, which published Amazing, decided that enough was enough, and the Shaver Mystery was dropped from the magazine, in spite of the fact that Shaver’s ‘revelations’ had virtually doubled its readership and enabled it to move from quarterly to monthly publication. (58)
Palmer would later claim that the Shaver Mystery had been suppressed by a publisher ‘too sedate’ for material of this nature. However, Wright notes that Palmer’s relations with Ziff-Davis had become rather strained, possibly as a result of his launching Fate magazine. (Palmer left Amazing in 1949 to concentrate on his new publication.) (59) According to Jim Probst in his book Shaver: The Early Years: ‘The Queens Science Fiction League of New York passed a resolution that the Shaver stories endangered the sanity of their readers, and brought the resolution before the Society for the Suppression of Vice. A fan conference in Philadelphia was rocked by threats to draw up a petition to the Post Office, asking that Amazing Stories be banned from the mail.’ (60)
This was not the end of the Shaver Mystery, however; it would later inspire a number of people to start their own publications. Richard Toronto published Shavertron between 1979 and 1985. Subtitled ‘The Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania’, the magazine reported on the continuing activities of the nefarious dero, such as the time they apparently interfered with Toronto’s car while it was parked on a steep hillside and he was standing in front of it (Toronto barely managed to avoid being run over and killed). (61)
The Hollow Hassle was published by Mary Le Vesque between 1979 and 1983 and featured a regular column by the Rev Charles A. Marcoux, a fascinating and colourful character who claimed to have hunted the deros during his many cave explorations. In the August 1981 issue of The Hollow Hassle he wrote (in typically muddled syntax): ‘My experiences in the cavern world began at a very young age with astral experiences in the caverns ever since my birth, and in other worlds from other dimensions too. I joined R. A. Palmer and R. S. Shaver’s group in January of 1945, and I am one of the few original members left. I still “SEARCH FOR THE PORTALS,” and as far as I know, am
